4 Fabulous Online Tools

When you're working online 10 hours a day as I do, you appreciate all the help you can get. Here are four great tools I've discovered over the last six months that make my job a lot easier. Have one of your own I probably don't know about yet? Feel free to enlighten all of us in the comments below.

1. Sliderocket

As freemium slideshow tools go, this is the best I've found. Long before my 30-day free trial expired, I was hooked and ponied up for a monthly membership. It's always better to show rather than tell, so here's just a small sample of what you can do with Sliderocket:

They've also got superb customer service and have called me on my cell whenever I've needed them.

2. Dropbox

My pal Alexis Ohanian, founder of reddit.com, turned me onto Dropbox. It's another brilliant freemium model that gives you 2GB of free cloud storage. Best part is: once you install the Dropbox folder on all your computers, whatever you place in that folder is automatically synced on all devices, even on your phone. No more emailing files to yourself or plugging in flash drives to transfer stuff! I use it often throughout the day.

3. Search Free Fonts

Just as the name implies, this great site let's you not only search, but test free fonts before you download them. Once you find a font that looks interesting, you can type on the page and voila! they're transposed in real time. Check out how I did this sample here.

4. iPhone iCon Maker

This one is just plain fun... You know how sometimes you get a lame icon when you "bookmark" a Safari page into your phone's app collection? Well this nifty site lets you upload any old image you want and turn it into an iPhone app icon. Try it out and have fun with it!

Grace Hopper was a computing pioneer. She coined the term "computer bug" after finding a moth stuck inside Harvard's Mark II computer in 1947 (which in turn led to the term "debug," meaning solving problems in computer code). She did the foundational work that led to the COBOL programming language, used in mission-critical computing systems for decades (including today). She worked in World War II using very early computers to help end the war. When she retired from the U.S. Navy at age 79, she was the oldest active-duty commissioned officer in the service. Hopper, who was born on this day in 1906, is a hero of computing and a brilliant role model, but not many people know her story.

In this short documentary from FiveThirtyEight, directed by Gillian Jacobs, we learned about Grace Hopper from several biographers, archival photographs, and footage of her speaking in her later years. If you've never heard of Grace Hopper, or you're even vaguely interested in the history of computing or women in computing, this is a must-watch:

Every year, the 45 million or so red crabs on the remote Australian territory of Christmas Island migrate en masse from their forest burrows down to the ocean to mate, and so the female crabs can release their eggs into the sea to hatch. The migration starts during the fall, and the number of crabs on the beach often peaks in December. This year, you don’t have to be on Christmas Island to witness the spectacular crustacean event, as New Atlas reports. You can see it on Google Street View.

Watching the sheer density of crabs scuttling across roads, boardwalks, and beaches is a rare visual treat. According to the Google blog, this year’s crabtacular finale is forecasted for December 16, and Parks Australia crab expert Alasdair Grigg will be there with the Street View Trekker to capture it. That is likely to be the day when crab populations on the beaches will be at their peak, giving you the best view of the action.

Google

Google Street View is already a repository for a number of armchair travel experiences. You can digitally explore remote locations in Antarctica, recreations of ancient cities, and even the International Space Station. You can essentially see the whole world without ever logging off your computer.

Sadly, because Street View isn’t live, you won’t be able to see the migration as it happens. The image collection won’t be available until sometime in early 2018. But it’ll be worth the wait, we promise. For a sneak preview, watch Parks Australia’s video of the 2012 event here.